> As such, I'm inclined to think the marketing effect of illegal copies exceeds the lost revenue.
My personal experience doesn't really support this. I used to work for a publisher of fiction books. Our business model was that we'd sell them exclusively on our website as eBooks for some time before putting out physical copies. One result of that was we were able to track all sales of the books in realtime.
The vast majority of eBooks were sold with DRM. But it would only be a matter of time before the DRM would be cracked and we'd see the books pop up on pirate sites. By tracking our sales figures, we noticed a very steep decline in sales as soon as a pirate version of a book became available. This was very consistent across our range of products.
I'm personally not a fan of DRM, however I don't think we would have been able to survive without it. We would always hope the DRM wouldn't be cracked quite so soon, as we'd receive very few sales afterwards.
Of course, the types of books we published were different to O'Reilly's, and our target audiences were different. The effect of piracy might not necessarily be so bad for them as it was for us. I'm sure it's still a challenge, though.
My personal experience doesn't really support this. I used to work for a publisher of fiction books. Our business model was that we'd sell them exclusively on our website as eBooks for some time before putting out physical copies. One result of that was we were able to track all sales of the books in realtime.
The vast majority of eBooks were sold with DRM. But it would only be a matter of time before the DRM would be cracked and we'd see the books pop up on pirate sites. By tracking our sales figures, we noticed a very steep decline in sales as soon as a pirate version of a book became available. This was very consistent across our range of products.
I'm personally not a fan of DRM, however I don't think we would have been able to survive without it. We would always hope the DRM wouldn't be cracked quite so soon, as we'd receive very few sales afterwards.
Of course, the types of books we published were different to O'Reilly's, and our target audiences were different. The effect of piracy might not necessarily be so bad for them as it was for us. I'm sure it's still a challenge, though.